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“Powerful in [Iris Murdoch] was the love of human differences and of personal idiosyncrasy. … Stones were for [her] a natural symbol of individuality. … [N]o two natural stones, when examined closely, will turn out to be exactly alike. … [T]he scientist and the technologist, perhaps self-consciously and harmlessly, substitute an abstraction from the reality for the reality itself, which is always in the last analysis a collection of individuals. … When the individuals under consideration are persons, not stones, the result is unlikely to be harmless. There is loss.”
My epigraph speaks to “individuals”—and in this context I am using it to refer to individual experiences and definitions of love. I do not think it is fair to talk about love in a general way, in a generic way. Each instance of love is unique to the circumstance and to the persons who are involved. Glen Gabbard has framed the panel for us with ten definitions of “love” that are witty and trenchant.1 But they point to vulnerability and longing rather than exist in vulnerability and longing, although my guess is that, at heart, these selections are probably quite personal to Glen. I can't talk about love in impersonal language. For me, “love” demands the language of experience, and of personal experience, not the language of theory and metatheory, and certainly not a language of emotional distance. So, what I say here about “love” is about me, not about “you,” and not about “them.”